The Federation of Kenya Employers (FKE) and Business Unity South Africa (BUSA) held a successful business-to-business (B2B) engagement between 9th -11th March 2020. The event was organized under the auspices of the Skills Initiative for Africa (SIFA) and hosted at the FKE/BUSINESSAfrica secretariat in Nairobi – Kenya. It was attended by BUSA’s Sino Moabalobela, Social Policy Manager two SIFA’s Regional Coordinators, Eastern (Stephen Gichohi) and Southern Africa (Cheryl James) as well as top the leadership of FKE led by the CEO, Jacqueline Mugo who also serves as the Secretary General of BUSINESSAfrica.
In recognition of the critical roles business plays in the achievement of the continental skills development agenda, SIFA has been engaging with business/private sector through employer associations at the policy and operational levels in promoting the occupational prospects of young Africans through innovative skills development. This B2B forum provided an opportunity to share strategic plans of the respective entities including their skills development agendas and lessons learnt from their past and current engagement in skills development initiatives. The forum also provided a platform to discuss future collaborative engagements within skills development. The regional coordinators shared their deliverables for 2020 while identifying various opportunities for collaboration between BUSA and FKE including the role of Business/private sector in skills competitions and World Skills platforms, geographical scaling of the SIFA regional coordination work in onboarding other Countries and engagement with the Regional Economic Communities (RECs). Furthermore, the B2B focused on wider engagement with other key stakeholders at the Continental level towards advancing skills development in addition to identifying and facilitating scaling of best practices on industry-training linkages which will be available on the ASPYEE portal.
The B2B culminated with a courtesy visit to the National Industrial Training Authority (NITA) training centre -Machakos County in Kenya for good practice discussions on strategic training-industry collaboration. NITA leads Kenya’s agenda on industrial training through training in various vocational fields with demand-driven models in close collaboration with the Industry. FKE and NITA are planning for TVET-Industry open days in 2020.
NITA motorvicle workshop with Industry support
